I have been trying out some Linux rescue disks like BootMed, Avira Rescue Disk, UBCD for windows hard drive recovery. I am considering installing Linux on a old computer just for this purpose. Is there a certain distro that comes with lots of recovery tools built into the OS?

FWIW, I prefer to stay within the OS when it comes to system recovery. So I'd definitely try to use the most Windows specific recovery tools available before I'd try using Linux-based ones. I see that more as a last ditch sort of thing rather than the preferred way. The one place where I would definitely use a Linux solution is when attempting data recovery from a heavily infected Windows system. So far, malware doesn't straddle multiple operating systems that well. So there's a much smaller chance of propagating a Windows infection going in with Linux to get the user's data off the drive. Truth is, almost any live distro disk could be used for that.

Actually I do try Windows first to see if I can copy files. But it doesn't do any good when Windows doesn't see the drive. But Linux can. I usually use UBCD for a lot of stuff, but in my last case, it didn't do me any good.

So I thought instead of using a live cd, i would just install Linux. But I guess with a live cd, i can always get the latest and greatest release.

I'd suggest booting of a live linux distro and copying your user data over to an external drive. Most of the mainstream Linux distros can read DOS/FAT/FAT2/NTFS formats out of the box. Mint and Ubuntu definitely can. Once your data is safe you could just install or reinstall whatever OS you like. Data is data.

There are supposedly workarounds for it. And (fortunately) I have yet to need them. But I also haven't run into an issue with an EFI system - nor do I own one. So I have no way of testing or speaking with assurance on anything I've read when it comes to that.

There are supposedly workarounds for it. And (fortunately) I have yet to need them. But I also haven't run into an issue with an EFI system - nor do I own one. So I have no way of testing or speaking with assurance on anything I've read when it comes to that.

Just had an EFI (Dell) machine on the bench yesterday, that needed an offline virus scan. We enabled the legacy boot option, tossed in the Kaspersky Rescue Disk, and it booted up just fine. After the scan ran, switched it back to EFI and the OS came back to life.

Issue ended up being that the AOL Tech Fortress - that was "helpfully" auto added by AOL... - had decided to lock the machine down and break everything. So the scan wasn't actually necessary, but it can be done.

@SJ - that's good to hear. I had heard some rumors about certain machines not allowing a switch to legacy boot. But I guess they were only rumors after all?

GPT support is already in the Linux kernal. But you may need to recompile it if the distro you're using hasn't enabled it for you. Fortunately, most of the more recent distro releases have done so. Really good article from IBM on all that here.

Last I heard, the UEFI issue is still up in the air for some distros. But a few of the majors (Suse/Fedora/Ubuntu) have already cut a deal with the devil, so it's not an issue. For them.

In the last week or so I used SystemRescueCD to pull data off of an HDD -- the contained GNU ddrescue was quite useful. There are some related utilities ddrutilty (among other things has some nice NTFS-related tools) and ddrescueview which don't appear to be on the ISO, but I was able to fetch them (one had a precompiled binary and the other was easy to build from source) while booted into SystemRescueCD.

It took some studying to learn how to use GNU ddrescue (note: there's another program with a similar purpose and name), but the results so far appear to be that I was able to recover all except one file.

The following things seemed worth considering before getting started:

Consider practicing on something you don't care about too much -- and consider doing so before an emergency.

Arrange for some place for the logfile(s) to be saved to -- I used some USB memory.

Arrange for a device to save GNU ddrescue output (not necessarily logfile) to -- typically one is likely to want something that is larger in capacity than the sum of the partitions one wishes to attempt recovery for.

Don't overwrite past logfile on subsequent runs -- work off of a copy.

Consider an initial run that doesn't try hard to recover much -- if you decide later you want to wipe the good areas, the logfile for the initial run may present less trouble.

If dealing with NTFS, examine ddrutility -- there's a contained tool that may make the pass through an NTFS filesystem faster.

Don't attempt individual file recovery off of a fresh result of running GNU ddrescue -- clone first and work off of that.

These are not faults with the documentation, FWIW

I was happy to learn that sometimes even HDDs with trouble can be "mostly wiped" by leveraging an appropriate GNU ddrescue log file and an appropriate invocation of the utility using its fill mode to target "good" areas.